Robert Frost

The Vanishing Red

Last Native American

Frost references the historical displacement of Native Americans in New England. 'Last Red Man' signals colonial violence through a casual tone.

HE is said to have been the last Red Man

In Acton. And the Miller is said to have laughed—

If you like to call such a sound a laugh.

But he gave no one else a laugher’s license.

For he turned suddenly grave as if to say,

“Whose business,—if I take it on myself,

Whose business—but why talk round the barn?—

When it’s just that I hold with getting a thing done with.”

You can’t get back and see it as he saw it.

It’s too long a story to go into now.

You’d have to have been there and lived it.

Then you wouldn’t have looked on it as just a matter

Of who began it between the two races.

Some guttural exclamation of surprise

The Red Man gave in poking about the mill

Over the great big thumping shuffling mill-stone

Mill as Power Symbol

The mill represents technological and cultural dominance. Water and machinery become metaphors for colonial control.

Disgusted the Miller physically as coming

From one who had no right to be heard from.

“Come, John,” he said, “you want to see the wheel pit?”

Coded Violence

The 'wheel pit' is a euphemism for murder. Frost uses spatial metaphors to suggest unspoken violence.

He took him down below a cramping rafter,

And showed him, through a manhole in the floor,

The water in desperate straits like frantic fish,

Salmon and sturgeon, lashing with their tails.

Then he shut down the trap door with a ring in it

That jangled even above the general noise,

And came up stairs alone—and gave that laugh,

Casual Brutality

The Miller's laugh reveals the normalized racism of frontier interactions. Language itself becomes a weapon.

And said something to a man with a meal-sack

That the man with the meal-sack didn’t catch—then.

Oh, yes, he showed John the wheel pit all right.